Chris Christie: Human Tumult Machine

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie addresses the delegates. Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

“Let’s do something fun,” Chris Christie said at the Republican National Convention last night. The governor of New Jersey had spent the past day in less expansive emotional states—defending Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech on the "Today" show, expressing his own disappointment that Mike Pence was the Republican Vice-Presidential pick—and he seemed due for some pleasure. Christie told the delegates that he, a famously truculent former federal prosecutor, would present an indictment against Hillary Clinton, and they would get to judge whether she was guilty or innocent.

The crowd on the floor, gossipy and distracted when Paul Ryan spoke, a few minutes earlier, grew attentive. This was the case that Christie had been promising he would make against Clinton since early in his own Presidential campaign. “As a flawed evaluator of dictators,” Christie asked, suggesting that the former of Secretary of State had been too ready to reset relations with Russia, “is Hillary Clinton guilty or not guilty?” He asked for verdicts on Clinton’s competence (“as an inept negotiator”) and for being weak toward the Syrian regime (“as an awful judge of the character of a dictator-butcher in the Middle East”). The floor, following the California delegation’s lead, chanted, “Lock her up!” Christie said, "I'm getting there."

If Christie was pursuing Clinton last night, he was also being pursued. Earlier in the day, Christie’s mentor and appointee David Samson, who was once the chairman of the Port Authority, had pleaded guilty to shaking down United Airlines to keep it from cancelling a direct flight that he took to his vacation home. The case against Samson grew out of the investigation into the Christie administration’s vindictive George Washington Bridge lane closures, which presses on. Even during his political ascent, Christie was a creature of grievance and emotion, an open wound, a human tumult machine. When he gave the keynote speech at the 2012 Republican Convention, Christie got three-quarters of the way through a talk about himself (eighty paragraphs into the written version) before he said the name of the candidate, Mitt Romney. This time, Christie had expected to be named Donald Trump’s running mate and, when he found out that he wouldn’t be, the governor turned “livid,” Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort,

New Jersey Republican officials are a prosperous and pragmatic clan, and by now they have generally made their peace with Donald Trump, as Christie has. “If you want to be a delegate from New Jersey, you really need to be a Trump delegate,” Henry Kuhl, who was attending his eleventh Convention, pointed out. The main feeling among New Jersey’s fifty-one delegates was that Christie and Trump shared certain attributes: plainspokenness, an executive talent, perhaps an allergy to ideology. “It’s not my particular style, but he’s effective,” a delegate named Mary O’Brien said of Trump. Next to her, a delegate named John Traier said that he was disappointed that the national Republican platform was so starkly opposed to gay and lesbian rights, but added that he was pleased that the New Jersey delegation had supported equality. “Baby steps,” Traier said. On the broader matter of Trump he was serene. “Every so often the Party goes through a metamorphosis,” he said.

Up on the stage, Christie was completing one of his own. During his Presidential campaign, Christie had subdued his talk of American immigrant diversity in favor of skepticism about Syrian refugees, and now he shed the sentiment and the lugubriousness, the parts of his character that least matched Trump’s. Some act of interior whittling had taken place. On Monday, when the mood at the Convention was dark and nationalistic, Christie had been said to be polishing his speech; by Tuesday it was full of the prosecutor’s blacks and whites, the high moral tone of a man eyed by a grand jury himself. “In Libya and Nigeria—guilty,” Christie said of Clinton. “In China and Syria—guilty. In Iran and Russia and Cuba—guilty.” Christie had maneuvered into place. Already Trump has said that Christie will lead his Presidential transition team. The talk among the New Jersey delegation was that he’d also make a fine attorney general.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.